(3089/898) Left and right, America infiltrates

2093) One sense in which the 1960s produced two utopias is that while both the left and the right lost their faith in government, some preserved a confidence that a benign anarchy was possible - that human beings might be both free and happy if they got government off their backs. The rise of neoconservativism mirrored the rise of the utopian left in more way than one, of course. One conservative impulse was simply to oppose all talk of liberation. When young people on the left decided that they had had enough of sexual propriety, this upset people like Irving Kristol and helped to prepare the way for the current, strange alliance between Jewish, highly educated, urban ex-liberals and the very different supporters of the Christian Coalition.

What is more interesting is the degree to which the libertarian, or Hayekian, defense of free markets, laissez-faire, and much-reduced government intervention appealed to the same distrust of centralized authority and bureaucratic regulation that the 1968 left had expressed. [...]

On the whole, though, American conservatives have been uneasy about the libertarian case. Libertarians tend to be skeptical about the Pentagon, to urge the criminalization of drug use, and to be rather relaxed about prostitution and pornography. Conservatives notoriously want weak government control of business and finance; but they tend to favor strong police and military power on the one hand and to be culturally authoritarian on the other.

Alan Ryan
"Dream Time"
New York Review of Books (10/17/1996)
[review of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political
Journey of the Generation of 1968
by Paul Berman]

2094) To [the] Eastern European [radicals] of 1989, the United States was the favored model of the liberal-capitalist society. [...] [W]hat was wanted was American capitalism without America's racial tensions, urban blight, and inadequate welfare state. [...] To students of sociological theory, it was the United States described in the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. But the deeper truth was that it was the fantasy of America captured in Oklahoma! or On the Town - friendly, high-spirited, resourceful and self-reliant - that the class of 1989 had fallen for.

Alan Ryan
"Dream Time"
New York Review of Books (10/17/1996)
[review of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political
Journey of the Generation of 1968
by Paul Berman]

2095) The Americanization of world culture means not only that Coca-Cola will rot the teeth and American pop music change the musical sensibilities of the rest of the globe, but that American aspirations of personal, sexual tolerance and happiness may also follow. Feminist demands for equality between the sexes are met with anger in many parts of the world, but they are making slow, steady headway nonetheless. Demands for tolerance for sexual minorities are following in their wake [...]

Alan Ryan
"Dream Time"
New York Review of Books (10/17/1996)
[review of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political
Journey of the Generation of 1968
by Paul Berman]